The invention relates in general to communication systems and more specifically to an apparatus, system, and method for managing reverse link resources in a communication system.
Many wireless communication systems employ geographically distributed base stations to provide communication cells or regions where a serving base station provides communication service to mobile stations within the region corresponding to the serving base station. In certain situations, the reverse link signals transmitted from each mobile station to a base station interfere with other reverse link signals transmitted from other mobile stations. Because of the interference and limited resources, the capacity of each base station is limited and many systems manage reverse link resources in order to improve overall performance of the communication system. One method of controlling the reverse link resources includes limiting the transmitted energy of the mobile stations. Some conventional systems incorporate a retransmission mechanism allowing information to be accurately reconstructed and received at the base stations. By limiting the transmission power level to a relatively low power level, reverse link resources are efficiently used while retransmissions allow the accurate reconstruction of transmitted information. A retransmission scheme results in an increased system capacity for time varying channels since an early termination of the retransmission scheme occurs when a good channel is utilized. Conventional systems, however, are limited in that the retransmissions result in increased transmission latency on the reverse link channels. The resource management techniques of conventional systems allow a mobile station to transmit a reverse link signal at higher relative transmission power levels where payload sizes are larger. For relatively smaller payloads, however, the mobile station is required to transmit at generally lower relative power levels resulting in approximately the same average latency times for all payload sizes.
Accordingly, there is a need for an apparatus, system, and method for efficiently managing reverse link resources in a communication system based on latency considerations.